Who we are

At Quest last week, after spending a couple of weeks talking about who God is, we moved on discussing who people are. If God is the creator of the universe and everything in it, then where do men and women fit into the equation?

On one level of thinking, people are just another part of God’s creation. We share characteristics with other creatures that God created. We breathe air; we have skeletons; we have children. But our position in the world and with God doesn’t stop there. Here are some of the other things we talked about.

• Genesis 2:7 tells us that God made Adam from the dust of the ground. So we started off as nothing. There is nothing special about what people were made from. Without the actions of God, there is nothing significant about us or our place in the world. We would just live our lives, then return to the dust we were made from.

• But God didn’t stop there. He breathed his spirit into us. As we talked about last week, when God breathed the breath of life into us, he breathed his very essence into us. This makes us different from other parts of creation. We actually carry part of the creator inside of us.

• Related to that, Genesis 1:26 tells us that God created us in his image. We spent a long time discussing what all that entails. Certainly one aspect of that is that God is spirit, and so when he made us in his image, he gave us a spirit as well. There is more to people than just a physical body. That is one of the things that make us different than the other creatures God created. God is an emotional being. Just about every emotion that humans express, we can also see God expressing at some point in the Bible. God also is creative. You don’t have to look very hard to see evidence of that aspect of God. Similarly, he made us creative. We people do creative things, they are displaying part of the nature of God.

• God created people to be in charge of creation. Genesis 1:26 says about people, “let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” God intended for people to charge over the earth. But that also means that we should be taking good care of creation. God gave us control, but we should be exercising that control in a way that would be pleasing to him.

• We were created to have a relationship with God – to be loved by him. God could have created us in a way that he could just command us to do what he wanted, but he didn’t. He wanted us to be able to love him back. He wants us to follow him, but he wants it to be because we have chosen to do so. It always means more when someone does what you ask because they want to rather than because they have to.

This discussion served as a good way to introduce the idea of the relationship between God and people. We will pick up this thread next week when we talk about “Plan A.” When God created the earth, before Adam and Eve sinned, what was God’s plan? What did he intend the relationship between God and people to look like? That’s where we are headed in the next couple of weeks.